Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Robert Medici John Cale on the road.

Five Favorite Facts about John Cale:

•   He studied musicology at London’s Goldsmiths College in the early 1960s, where his teachers dubbed him “Most Hateful Student” before awarding him a prestigious Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study with the Boston University Orchestra.
• He appeared on the game show “I’ve Got A Secret” in 1963. His secret: participating in the New York performance of an Erik Satie piece that ran for more than 18 hours.
• He composed the soundtrack for the prison sexploitation flick “Caged Heat,” Jonathan Demme’s 1974 directorial debut.
• He decapitated a dead chicken on stage in 1977 in Croydon, prompting two vegetarian members of his band to walk off. (He had vegetarian musicians in his band?)
• He produced Patti Smith, Happy Mondays and Siouxsie and the Banshees, as well as Jennifer “I Had the Time Of My Life” Warnes’ third album, “Jennifer.” Impossible to find and never reissued, it’s probably genius.

Well, that’s a start. It is impossible to sum up John Cale in 700 words. Seven million wouldn’t be enough. Would there have been a Downtown music scene without the Velvets and John Cale? Maybe, but it sure would have been different. He is an artist who has never stopped experimenting, never stopped reaching. He is fearless, complex, breathtakingly brilliant, exhausting, and inexhaustible. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Steve Lombardi

It’s that time of year again: Spring break! While college students are streaming like lemmings to the usual spots — Florida, Mexico, the Caribbean — there’s been an uptick of revelers heading for New York this year. You can see them — earbuds in, texting and stumbling around the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, updating their absent pals. We hope they’re enjoying themselves.

We don’t remember a lot of college students at CBGBs. Everyone seemed to have either graduated, dropped out or not bothered going in the first place. Oh, but the high school students! They were one of the secret treasures of the scene. Completely illegal and utterly irresistible, kids from 13 to 17 showed up at the bar nightly, bringing with them an extra jolt of innocence, energy and reckless abandon.

Bands like the Blessed, with 16-year-old Howie Pyro and Nick Berlin, performed frequently at Max’s and CBs and nobody blinked. Chris Parker, one of the underaged regulars at CBs, starred in Jim Jarmusch’s first feature, “Permanent Vacation.” And when local favorite X-Sessive graduated at 17 from roadie to bass player for the Voidoids, well, everyone was pleased.

That’s our boy, we thought. These barely-out-of-junior-high-school hell-raisers weren’t just tolerated, they were our mascots.

One of our favorite teenage bands was the Student Teachers. They met cute, when future keyboardist Bill Arning sat next to soon-to-be vocalist David Scharff and guitarist Philip Shelly at a John Cale show at CBs. Actually, Bill had come for the opening act, Lance Loud’s band, The Mumps, in his official role as president of their fan club. They were just 16.
Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library

Nicole Batchelor Regne

Well, it is officially Richard Hell month. His newly published book, “I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp,” has enjoyed a glowing review in The New York Times. There has been a flurry of personal appearances in bookstores and a string of interviews in print outlets and on the radio.

It has probably reminded this self-deprecating and essentially very private man why he dropped from the public eye to begin with. The tension between his introversion and the will to perform has always been Hell’s biggest conundrum. And what better way to help relive that dichotomy than a book tour? Maybe it’s a form of therapy. We have the feeling he would rather chew glass.
Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Christopher Harding

It is hard to overstate the giddy hedonism of the early ’80s. Riding the tide of the ’70s sexual revolution, when feminism and gay power met the “if it feels good do it” ethos of the era, it was a great time to be young and on the prowl.

For many, it was all no-strings encounters, erotic explorations and good dirty fun and if there were consequences, well, that would be for another day. It would be a year of two before the specter of AIDS reared its ugly head and there was a feckless, fumbling innocence to it all that in retrospect is kind of touching,

It took a band from Boston, Human Sexual Response, to provide a great soundtrack for those wild sweaty nights. With songs like “What Does Sex Mean to Me?” they were an art rock ensemble with a literate and hilarious take on sexual politics. Borrowing their name from the Masters and Johnson bestseller, the band blended four-part vocals with a bouncy new wave beat.
Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Pat Ivers Lounge Lizards

We finally shot the Lounge Lizards at CBGBs in the spring of 1979, just a few months before we bought our first color camera. Good thing, too. They just looked better in black and white.

Some called what they played fake jazz but we loved their sinuous stew of no wave, be-bop and cinematic soundscape that Robert Palmer of The New York Times famously described as “somewhere west of Charles Mingus and east of Bernard Hermann.”

And they looked like they sounded: natty, a bit louche and darkly captivating. You just wanted to light up a cigarette and enjoy. Founded by saxophonist John Lurie and his brother, pianist Evan Lurie, the band roster read like a Who’s Who of downtown: new music royalty, with more than 35 members cycling in and out over 20-odd years.
Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

L.P. cover.

Looking back at the cover of the L.P. that The Offs released in 1984, we didn’t remember that Jean-Michel Basquiat had designed it. But the image of their lead singer, Don Vinyl, face down, his bicep glistening with the tattoo of a .45 pistol — that we had not forgotten.

We recall Don coming to our apartment the day he got the ink, his arm still red and a little bloody. “Paul Simonon is getting the same one!” he told us, excitedly. It was the summer of 1981 and everyone in the East Village was getting tats, even The Clash. Bob Roberts, The Offs’ saxophonist — and also a tattooist — had done the work for both.

We met The Offs in 1979, on our first trip to the Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. They were hugely popular on the West Coast, bringing a mix of punk, funk and reggae with a political bent that sounded fresh. When they came to New York later that year, we became friends.

Their bassist, Denny DeGorio, often crashed on our couch. He remembers how the band was formed: “Don and I were roommates in this flat on Mission, along with Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys and guys from Flipper and The Dils; it was a real punk-rock flop house.” Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Emily Armstrong

In 1980, Ronald Reagan ushered in a long cold winter of conservatism in America. But a little bit of heat was generating on the Lower East Side. Over on the Bowery, the Ballistic Kisses were in their loft, practicing. With a sound that combined post-punk and politics, they brought something new to the downtown club scene.

Michael Shore, rock critic for The Soho Weekly News recalls, “In those days we did not even have a name for electropop, synth or what they were doing. And their lead singer, Mike Parker was very intense. They were the first NYC band with genuine, serious political thought, but with an interesting difference from the Sex Pistols — they seemed to be more street level. The Ballistic Kisses had an honest, urgent, sincere political thing going on.”

The band also had an interesting back story. Parker was an established poet and an elected judge in the bohemian mining town of Ward, Colorado. He came east with his friend and fellow martial artist, Jeff Freund. When Parker moved into a Bowery loft with musician Michael Hrynyk, things started to happen. Drummer Rich McClusky remembers,“Hrynyk would stay in bed all day and play music on his synthesizer and Michael Parker would read his poetry real loud. They figured, why don’t we put some of this to music? Jeff started playing bass and they wanted someone to do percussion instead of a drum box, so I joined them.”
Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Armen Kachaturian Poster for CBGB show.

“I could describe her to you in details, but those are just facts. She was unforgettable, and everybody who knew her, loved her.”

That was Scott Kempner of The Dictators and the Del-Lords describing Helen Wheels, a woman who to the mainstream may seem like a punk rock history footnote, but who to CBGB veterans was a beloved icon.

Standing just over five feet tall, Helen embodied the tough, take-no-prisoners front-woman before Heart, Joan Jett or Pat Benatar made it acceptable. With tattoos, muscles and a friendship with the Hells Angels, she broke the mold, even for CBGBs. She claimed the beloved python, Lilith, was the largest privately-owned reptile in New York.

Helen got her start in the music scene early. While a student at Stony Brook in 1968, she met Blue Oyster Cult, then known as Soft White Underbelly. She moved into a house with them on Long Island and was soon designing their leather clothing and writing lyrics for their songs. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Photo courtesy Chan Poling Chan Poling

New York and London were the first cities to feel the heartbeat of punk, then bands started springing up in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Like a contagion, the new music spread and mutated from basement to garage, from Athens, Ga., to Santa Cruz.

It was thrilling for New Yorkers to hear about these regional bands and by 1980, we were finally seeing these alternative bands tour. The Suburbs arrived in New York from Minneapolis that summer. They brought the heartland to us with an urgent bounce, playing a brand of danceable new wave that was as funky and melodious as it was infectious. This video clip of their song, “Music For Boys,” captures them at Danceteria when they were at their muscular, modern rock best.

Chan Poling and Beej Chaney were the two front men, on keyboards and lead vocals, respectively. Friends since high school, they went out to Los Angeles in 1974 to attend Cal Arts. Chan played in a local punk band, The Technocats. The exposure to so many musicians and artists inspired him, and he began writing music — he just wasn’t sure for whom or what.

Returning home to Minneapolis in 1977, he found himself listening to a band, Suicide Commandos, formed by his childhood friend, Chris Osgood. “They were the only band in town that played the kind of music that was in my head,” Poling recalls, “I needed people to play with like that.”

Bayard Michael The Suburbs

Chris Osgood introduced him to Michael Halliday and Bruce Allen, who along with Beej and drummer Hugo Klaers, became The Suburbs. They never looked back. The band lived and rehearsed in a warehouse basement that fortuitously had an abandoned bar attached to it.

They couldn’t get gigs because there were no clubs that booked bands with original music. So they began throwing their own parties with a keg or two and a few bucks admission at the door. The Suburbs performed, along with other locals like The Replacements, until the success of their parties caught the eye of a local promoter, who ran a place called Jay’s Longhorn bar. One visit to their basement, and he changed his booking policy from jazz to punk, hiring The Suburbs for the next night. The Longhorn became the CBGBs of Minneapolis. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Ritz Furs

“You don’t need a million to look like a million!” So went the tagline touting Ritz Furs in a ubiquitous late night commercial that ran throughout the ’70s and ’80s. Ladies were urged to sell their skins or buy them second-hand at a fraction of the price because, like the man said, “Some women ski in St. Moritz; other women just look that way.”

Cynthia Sley, lead singer of the Bush Tetras, got to live the dream. One night, she found a full-length fur coat lying on an East Village street. She picked it up, dusted it off and the next day sold it to Ritz Furs. The cash allowed her to live another month in New York, pursuing her art instead of a paycheck.

The choice of art over commerce has been a thread running through the history of the Bush Tetras. A staple on the New York music scene since 1979, their sound has been described as both danceable postpunk and no wave, two utterly different styles that they somehow made work together. The original Bush Tetras lineup consisted of guitarist Pat Place and keyboardist Adele Bertei, both freshly departed from The Contortions, as well as bassist Laura Kennedy, who had been their roadie. Dee Pop, a drummer with a taste for jazz as well as punk, rounded out the mix.
Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Halloween poster.

After a weekend of belated Halloween and Day of the Dead celebrations, how about another bit of eerie entertainment? Better than a bag of candy, more shiver-inducing than a zombie apocalypse: ladies and gentlemen, we present The Cramps.

For more than a quarter of a century, the band cave-stomped their signature brand of rockabilly and blues with a blend so stripped down that for years, they used no bass. Relying on sinuous guitars and drums to stake their rhythms, they created a sound that invoked surf rock, grade-B horror films and a whiff of medicine show. Lead singer Lux Interior hated the use of the term psychobilly to describe their sound but the fans embraced it.

The Cramps obliged those delighted to follow music down any dark and twisting corridor: their live shows were sweaty, primal and wild. They sounded like they crawled from an oozing swamp, or the back of some toxic ’50s auto graveyard. And the fans wanted to dive right in. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Emily Armstrong Danceteria Video Lounge

When BAD Burger announced last month that it was ditching its plan to stay open 24/7, it seemed like one more market indicator of the neighborhood’s shifting demographic from boho stronghold to, well, we’re not sure what it is anymore, other than upscale. It got us thinking about how much things have changed from those wild years in the late ’70s and early ’80s when rents were low, charm was currency and after hours clubs were everywhere. The fact that these establishments were blatantly illegal barely furrowed a brow back then. They were just part of the city’s recession economy.

For a lot of people, those early Reagan Years were also the Up All Night Years. Typically, an after-hours spot opened around 3 a.m. and gave up the ghost around noon. Somehow, they were always packed and never too hard to find. Given the variety and sheer number of options available, folks tended to flit from place to place, but clubs did have individual identities. AM/PM in Tribeca attracted a mix of Wall Street types, downtown rockers and artists, while Crisco Disco and the Anvil were for the gay boys on the West Side. The Jefferson was shabby chic, a derelict vaudeville theater and a bit of a death trap; there was only a narrow staircase to the second floor where the festivities sometimes spilled out onto a rickety marquee overlooking East 14th Street. It did have romance: a friend of ours met his first wife there. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Pylon’s debut album.

A few years ago, a woman took her 14-year-old daughter to a Sleater/Kinney concert. After the show, a band member approached the mom and breathlessly asked, “Are you Vanessa from Pylon? We love you!” Score one for the parental unit.

Pylon is the greatest group from the new wave scene that you probably never heard of. When Rolling Stone saluted R.E.M. as the best band in America in 1987, their drummer Bill Berry disagreed. “We’re not the best rock ‘n roll band in America.” He thought Pylon was.

In 1978, they were four art students from Athens, Georgia, a southern college town where bands like the B-52s were establishing a beachhead for alternative rock. Lead singer Vanessa Briscoe Hay recalls that their path to forming a band was “as unlikely as it seemed preordained.” Guitarist Randall Bewley and bass player Michael Lachowski began writing music and practicing in a studio. Their penchant for playing the same riff over and over earned the attention of their exasperated upstairs neighbor, Curtis Crowe, who finally knocked on their door and offered to be their drummer. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library. 

Time’s a funny thing, especially where musicians are concerned. If the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones doesn’t scare you, perhaps the realization that we’ve shared nearly 36 years with Bono and 29 with Madonna will.

Still, it’s a little surprising that a mere 21 years separates the release of “Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely” in 1958 and the above video of Iggy Pop covering the LP’s iconic track, “One for My Baby,” at Hurrah’s in 1979. At first glance, the culture wars of the ’60s would seem to render irrelevant the bars, broads and bruisers ethos that Ol’ Blue Eyes represented. But for the generation that made up the original punks, those childhood memories of cigarette smoke, parents’ late nights and Sinatra’s music ran deep. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library. In this edition: the discovery of a lost Philip Glass recording.

Gary Reese

In 1687, Newton’s third law of motion explained that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For punk rock, that reaction was the Artists Space 1978 music festival. With a line-up featuring the Contortions, DNA, Mars, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, it spawned the No Wave scene. The sound was atonal, abrasive and utterly new, combining elements of funk, jazz and just plain noise. As Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group observed, “the edge that originally attracted people to punk rock, that splintered sound, was almost gone by the late ‘70s. No Wave kinda picked up the artistic banner.”

In 1980, the pendulum swung again for four of No Wave’s most influential musicians. Jody Harris, Donny Christensen and George Scott III were veterans of the Contortions and Pat Irwin had performed with George in 8-Eyed Spy with Lydia Lunch. They were done with moody lead singers and wanted to try another way. They formed The Raybeats. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

When the Go-Go’s arrived in New York City from the West Coast in August, 1980, they were a sweet, goofy package of pure pop in a New Wave wrapper. They provided the kind of light summer fun that can prove irresistible and were well received when they played their first night at Danceteria (see clip).

The reviews were a little harsher back in L.A. Wayzata Camerone, founder of Hollywood after-hours club the Zero Zero recalls, “They were laughed at; we thought they couldn’t play and they had insipid songs. But Belinda [Carlisle] was sweet and polite.”

The Go-Go’s had just recorded their first record for Stiff, “We Got the Beat,” and it was getting some radio play. The following year, IRS signed them and the band’s LP, “Beauty and the Beat,” was a smash. Those rough edges were sanded off and they were a viable commercial property, the first all-female band who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments to top the Billboard charts.

You’ve got to give them their props. As Ann Magnuson cannily observes, “Success was more characteristic of the West Coast, specifically in ‘This Town’ of Tinsel that The Go-Go’s famously sang about, not so much in the dystopia that was Downtown NY in the early 80s.” She should know. Ann was one of the few – along with Eric Bogosian – who made the transition from downtown performance artist to successful professional actor. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Emily Armstrong Max Blagg

August 1980 in the Lower East Side: it was the Summer of Heroin.

Clinton Street was not yet restaurant row – it was lined with shooting galleries, rows of cars with Jersey plates and steerers plying their wares. “We got Snoopy, 7-Up, Yellow Bag; we got the stuff that can kill you, man!” – a pitch both fascinating and confounding. Junkies were on every other corner and street muggings were rampant. Home break-ins were a fact of life so common that it became uninteresting unless it happened to you.

Which it did. We came home one night to find our apartment tossed and our video equipment gone. At the time, we were running the Video Lounge at Danceteria and our coworkers rallied to our support, organizing a benefit. Poet Max Blagg, then a bartender at the club, read his epic, “Smack Yourself Senseless.” His poem, a brutal five minute take-down of heroin chic, was a comfort. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

Richard Hell with set list.

You can’t talk about punk rock without talking about Richard Hell. Television, the band he founded in 1973 with then best friend Tom Verlaine, was one of the groups – along with Blondie and the Ramones – that laid the foundation for the downtown scene at CBGBs. Sex Pistols impresario Malcolm McLaren purportedly looked at a poster of Television in 1974, pointed at Richard and said, “I want to start a band that looks like him.”

With his chopped hair and ripped-up shirt, Hell looked like nobody else. And with his kinetic, jangly stage presence and slinky bass, he sounded like nobody else. “Richard had some charisma you can’t buy in a store and apply to yourself like a cream,” recalled Television guitarist, Richard Lloyd. ”He had ‘it,’ the inimitable ‘it,’ the mysterious ‘it.’ His loopy bass lines were cartoonish in their wonderment; he was fantastic.”

Not everyone in the band agreed and Richard left to join the Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders in 1975. But sharing stage and song time with Thunders seemed like a Television rerun for Hell: “I wanted to try something quicker, more strange than the stuff Johnny wanted,” he said. Read more…

Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong continue sorting through their archives of punk-era concert footage as it’s digitized for the Downtown Collection at N.Y.U.’s Fales Library.

At CBGB, it was a crapshoot what you would hear on a given night (maybe folk rock, maybe noise bands) and we, the audience, said bring it on. If the music was good, we listened to it. But over in England, there was a culture war raging that was alien to most variety-loving New Yorkers.

Teds were the original “rebel teenagers” of the late 40s and early 50s, with their own unique clothing style and love of early rock and roll. They endured as a niche group for years, enjoying a resurgence in the 70s. They held on to their sartorial and musical traditions – and with it, an unfortunate penchant for violence, a behavior certainly fanned by the British tabloids. Though the gritty details remain debatable, it seemed inevitable that the conservative, volatile Teds would pick a fight with the publicity-loving, anarchic punks. The natty Teds didn’t like safety pins and they sure didn’t like the Sex Pistols.

Leee Black Childers remembered going to a rockabilly show in London in 1977 while touring with the Heartbreakers as their manager during the “Anarchy in the UK” tour. “When the lights went up, Teds suddenly descended on us and threatened to beat us up for being punks,” he said. “This kid, Levi Dexter stepped up and stuck up for us and we were saved.” Childers asked him if he had any friends, because with his looks he could start up a band. Levi recruited childhood friend Smutty Smiff and a few others and Childers became their manager. Read more…